Is Artificial Intelligence the Next Dot-Com Bubble?

If you’ve played Texas Hold’em, then you know how tough it is to be a good poker player. Lots of venture capitalists like to play poker, so it wasn’t surprising to see one who thought to himself “let’s see how good artificial intelligence (AI) really is“. He consulted a team of engineers and computer scientists to see where they might be able to exploit the AI agent named Lengpudashi. They then played 36,000 hands over 5 days and the AI agent kicked the isht out of them. We’ll stick to playing rock-paper-scissors with AI, but all of this is leading to some serious visibility for AI as an emerging technology – which as investors make us want to get some skin in the game. The problem is, there aren’t many ways to do that yet.

The recent news that artificial intelligence (AI) startup Afiniti may have confidentially filed for IPO was the first time that we started to feel like this thing might be revving up for real now. It wasn’t just because this would be the first pure-play AI startup to see an IPO, it was because we really couldn’t believe how effective Afiniti’s technology was in adding value. Afiniti is so confident in their AI technology that their business model is simply to take a cut of all the money you make as a result of using their technology. That there is real value, but don’t expect to see that everywhere. As the bright minds at CB Insights said, “if you have a website now, you have AI”. We believe it is equally important to focus on “AI pretenders” as it is to focus on the real “AI pure-plays” because we want all the investment dollars channeled to the appropriate places. This is one reason we go out of our way to expose over-the-counter (OTC) stocks.